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Happy birthday to PPM! 22 years old!
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Banshee
Supreme Banshee


Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam)
Joined: 15 Aug 2002
Location: Brazil

PostPosted: Fri Sep 30, 2022 7:28 am    Post subject:  Happy birthday to PPM! 22 years old!
Subject description: Cake through power! Cake through power! Cake through power!
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Hello everyone! Today, September 30th, is PPM's anniversary! We have survived for a very long 22 years already, and to remind you that everything started with a Tiberian Sun mod called PPM: Final Dawn, and today we have a little fun monster that provides everything except the download from PPM: Final Dawn. I reiterate that I still plan to finish this mod one day.

Our little old PPM monster has a lot of content to offer, most of it created by you, visitors. From hosted mods to tutorials, graphical resources of several kinds, sounds, maps, and an active community. Perhaps not as active as we had in earlier years, but it still survives the immediatism of today's internet. I mean, most of the internet forums are losing their popularity to communication tools that pose a faster-messaging pace, such as Whatsapp, Telegram, and Discord groups. Some people want quick and dedicated tech support. Others seem to have too much free time on their hands. For these people, forums are archaic tools. Considering the military thematic of the games covered here, Discord seems to be the big winner among the three tools I've mentioned earlier, as it is easier to be anonymous there (just as here), since some of the people who are interested in these games might have very questionable principles to say it in light terms. Some, in this case, mean minority, just to be clear. Discord also wins by being an excellent tool to stream to many people.

PPM was never made with this immediatism in mind. Sorry if it disappoints some of you. If you want the fastest responses for your modding doubts and the fastest feedback for your projects, PPM might not be the best place for it. But that's not a bad thing at all because PPM complements it. Time helps you to think twice (or more) and provides more elegant and constructive ideas. The human brain doesn't work well if you are hot-headed, let's be honest. Also, a slower pace of messaging allows you to focus your energy on your projects as well. PPM was never meant to be an overcrowded place but rather a place where you can comfortably pay attention to everything posted here. In forums overloaded with posts and spam, it is hard to catch and organize interesting content. And if people post too quickly there, dialogs might be compromised. If you expect useful responses, you have to expect people to actually read and pay attention to them.

Forums also have the advantage of being tracked by search engines. So, what you post here can be registered for posterity and help those who look for answers to their problems using search engines, which happen to be many people. Bear in mind that the number of registered users who browses the forums happen to be less than 5% of all visitors, so if you think that few people are responding to your post, it doesn't mean that few people read it in the first place. Discord, Whatsapp, and Telegram posts are not meant to be exported outside their environment. While this is good for the privacy of their posts, it is bad if you want to use these tools to spread the word to the world. For us, in PPM, it is much easier to spread news posted on ModDB than on Discord because we can track, import, and transform the format of this news to one compatible with our forums. If you post it on Discord, we have to do the procedure manually, which takes much more effort from our side.

However, prosperity is a crucial word for PPM and our 22 years of survival. If you post your content here, we make it available for as long as possible unless you post something absurd that violates laws or offends people. If a group of rogues posts certain kinds of crap on Discord public channels, there is a risk that the whole channel will be deleted, and years of interesting content may disappear in the blink of an eye. Here we are more careful simply to filter the crap and keep the rest. Of course that there is a risk of PPM eventually ending, which is definitely not on my plans, but our data is being exported to other sites, search engines, and the Internet Wayback Machine. So, something will be salvageable.


Some people think that I want to create a sort of PPM LLC or want to conquer the world by it gathering the whole community in its back, but my main priority is to make a comfortable place that is easy to maintain. And maintenance doesn't simply mean that the place works, but it should also have a constant flow of new content. Otherwise, people will lose interest in it. From my end, the kind of content I can create is news posts, updated tools, the Final Dawn mod, tutorials, etc. Unfortunately, my real life prevents me from doing everything simultaneously due to time constraints and other matters. And it can get worse once I get a job, constitute a new family, etc. So, I focus my energy on making PPM sustainable even if I have to be absent for some time. This is why I prioritize the news posts. They help to motivate others to visit the site by showing the activity of the community and also motivate people to be part of the news by having their content advertised to the rest of the community. Last year I made a tool that allowed me to post news much faster (from 30min to 2 hours being reduced to a few minutes in some cases). With a faster flux of news comes the need to organize these news posts, which is why one of the last year's birthday gifts was the subsites.

I still have work to do in terms of news posting tools to allow us to properly spotlight the resources you guys submit, as well as the content from other communities, but what was made so far has helped us to advance a lot in terms of news posting. I also have to progress a lot to facilitate the use of keywords on voxels, SHPs, and other resources.... as well as for your use in your mods. It will eventually be done, and something interesting will come out.

For now, we have a couple of smaller gifts to provide for this birthday:

1) We now have a Command & Conquer Generals subsite: https://generals.projectperfectmod.com.

2) The news posts from our subsites were fixed. You should no longer see broken quotes, broken videos, etc.

3) We have also tagged all tutorials that were submitted recently. So, if you search for #Tutorials #RedAlert2 (or replace #RedAlert2 with the game that you want), it will feature all tutorials. You can also browse the tutorials by using other keywords used in these tutorials.


It is also worth mentioning for those who like chatting that our forum backend engine was recently updated to allow new posts to show up as they are posted when you view topics. However, I still have to work on post edition and deletion. I have to work on the front end and test everything, of course. It's just a matter of time until we get this functionality fully working for registered users only and non-offtopic forums.

And finally, one cake, one purpose, because cake lives in death and our cake tradition must go on!




The credits for today's cake goes to this site


Key Words: #ProjectPerfectMod #Birthday #PPMForums #News 

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Crimsonum
Seth


Joined: 14 Jul 2005
Location: Fineland

PostPosted: Fri Sep 30, 2022 2:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Happy birthday PPM. You had a significant impact in my life, mostly in a good way, I think. You were the foundation of my modding career. I met good people and had a good time.

Too bad they've all moved on. Not much for me to do here either these days, but I don't mind. I have found new places and new people, some old faces too.

You were part of my journey. May you continue to help and entertain others in one way or another.

Sorry for sounding all gloomy, but I felt like being sincere. 22 years is a long time.

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DoMiNaNt_HuNtEr
General


Joined: 16 Feb 2005
Location: North America Posts: You cannot comprehend...

PostPosted: Fri Sep 30, 2022 6:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

I've always thought it odd that a chat program is called Discord. lol apparently the creators of Discord chose that name because they thought the word discord sounds cool. Clearly they don't know what that word means.

It means disagreement between people or lack of harmony between notes sounding together. So to name a chat program that is supposed to bring people together and have friendly chats with each other Discord, well... it's ironic.

The irony of naming a chat program Discord has never been lost on me.

Nice cake though. Your website is awesome. It's how I discovered modding. You should celebrate this birthday by having a few drinks at your local pub. Don't bring your mask though, you won't need it.  Wink

_________________
Destroy to create. All for the hunt to dominate!

IN-GAME NAME: MAKINTOKE

Last edited by DoMiNaNt_HuNtEr on Fri Sep 30, 2022 9:13 pm; edited 1 time in total

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4StarGeneral
General


Joined: 14 Sep 2006
Location: Limbo

PostPosted: Fri Sep 30, 2022 11:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

First of all, Happy Birthday, it's amazing that you've kept it going all these years, I've probably spent half my life here now. I've seen some pretty cool and creative people come and go here, and Banshee, you're a good person at heart, I hope you can achieve your dreams IRL and I'll cherish the good times of modding had here.

It sucks to say but after all this time I'm finally out of here; you say you want to make it "a comfortable place that is easy to maintain" but you won't put any energy into that ambition and it's been painful to watch all these years. It's a lot of work to maintain an entire website, I know, but it doesn't take up so much time as you cannot upgrade to something newer over time (you have to face it, phpbb and even your updated derivative of it are outdated for the whole of the internet) or have others help you improve it even though they have offered. Maybe you didn't see these offers or you've forgotten, but some of us have always wanted to see this place get better and change with the times. To put it plainly it's both too uncomfortable and unmaintained to me here with your moderating standards and generally un-cared for, as the blank box in the bottom corner here as I type reminds me. For me, it's aggravating to see it has fallen into shambles from its original glory and I feel it's no longer a safe space.

You know where to find me, take care everyone.

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"Don't beg for things; Do it yourself or you'll never get anything."

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Banshee
Supreme Banshee


Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam)
Joined: 15 Aug 2002
Location: Brazil

PostPosted: Sat Oct 01, 2022 3:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

@Crimsonum: Considering the replies I've seen here so far... gloomy is a word that seems to fit, Crimsonum, unforutnately.

@DoMiNaNt_HuNtEr: Thanks for your kind words. And hell yea, I do need the mask in the place I live, regardless of what you say (which I disagree with).

@G-E: Sorry, but I had to delete your post. I do not tolerate this kind of toxic attitude here.

4StarGeneral wrote:
First of all, Happy Birthday, it's amazing that you've kept it going all these years, I've probably spent half my life here now. I've seen some pretty cool and creative people come and go here, and Banshee, you're a good person at heart, I hope you can achieve your dreams IRL and I'll cherish the good times of modding had here.


Thank you. Same wishes for you.

4StarGeneral wrote:
It sucks to say but after all this time I'm finally out of here; you say you want to make it "a comfortable place that is easy to maintain" but you won't put any energy into that ambition and it's been painful to watch all these years.


There is a difference between not placing as much energy as you wanted with putting no energy at all.

No energy is something like this:
http://sun.tiberiumweb.org/main.php

A site that isn't updated for a decade, the last news is from a decade ago, and it surprisingly still works, but no one, nor the administrators post or visit their forums anymore.

I'm mentioning that sample because I don't want to be offensive to other people, so my sample is a site that I administrate.

This is very different from what happens here. PPM is still updated, receives care from its maintainers, and its technology (front end and back end) still receives updates. I do have certain periods where my activity drops due to real-life matters. It might be painful to watch in these moments, however, I am a human and I have limits. But right now, I am still active here and placing a lot of effort to improve this place in the best way I can.


4StarGeneral wrote:
It's a lot of work to maintain an entire website, I know, but it doesn't take up so much time as you cannot upgrade to something newer over time (you have to face it, phpbb and even your updated derivative of it are outdated for the whole of the internet) or have others help you improve it even though they have offered.


No, you don't know. If you knew, you wouldn't write what you wrote. Do you think that the effort of updating this forum software is the same as you need to change clothes? Of course not. You probably assume things that make no sense in real-life. The fork of phpBB that we use here is very different from anything else that exists on the internet. No script reliably converts its data to any other CMS or forum software. Not even to any phpBB 3.x. We'd lose a massive amount of data. from subforums to topic descriptions, announcements, certain forum permissions settings, keywords, all the backend that is the base of our news system, etc.

Our forums have a lot of features that the latest phpBB 3.3.8 does not have. Some others were designed in a different way than phpBB or other software. So, many of our features would be incompatible with different software and it would require a rewrite from me. Some of the so-called modern software is not necessarily easy to be customized. In fact, I have a hard time customizing Revora's Invision Power Board. It is extremely confusing to navigate in its code. I also have some annoying experiences with customizing Word Press, which happens to be quite disgusting to customize certain templates and some features there. This phpBB of ours might not have a beautiful code, it might be old, but it is much easier to tweak.

4StarGeneral wrote:
Maybe you didn't see these offers or you've forgotten, but some of us have always wanted to see this place get better and change with the times.


Most of those offers did not consider what I wrote in my paragraphs above. Some offers were accepted, and even a Tiberium Insurrection theme emerged.

Some people wanted me to create a Discord channel for PPM. I don't want this forum to be replaced by a PPM Discord channel as a mechanism of communication due to some of the reasons explained in the first post, although I do not completely discard the creation of a PPM Discord channel. In this case, its sole purpose would be to follow other channels and export its news to the forums someway how.

4StarGeneral wrote:
with your moderating standards and generally un-cared for


What moderation status is uncared for? I do moderate, I do answer to posts being reported. I might take a bit lighter on offtopic/politics forums, but on the modding ones and this one, I'm quite strict. Beware, however, that sometimes I'm sleeping or I'm not close to a computer. Other moderators are also active and they visit PPM on a daily basis.

4StarGeneral wrote:
as the blank box in the bottom corner here as I type reminds me.


This blank box is the result of the addition of the Generals portal announced in this very first post. In fact, I don't know why this blank box is being shown. If you hard refresh the site (ctrl + F5), it disappears. Because it is a div with the id generals_projectperfect_com_signin, which is specified in the forum CSS files as display=none. I do not understand why the browser doesn't load it sometimes. It's probably some caching problem. If the browser reads the recently uploaded CSS file related to the forum theme that you use, it shouldn't show it at all.

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SMIFFGIG
General


Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: Great Britain

PostPosted: Sat Oct 01, 2022 5:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Happy Birthday PPM!

And well done Banshee for all the years of continued hard work to keep this place pretty much singlehandedly going!

#Smile_colors  #Milti  #Popcornsmile  #Fadeing color  #2gunfire  Wizard  #Birthday  #Robot  #Bday

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MasterHaosis
General


Joined: 01 Nov 2010
Location: Serbia

PostPosted: Sun Oct 02, 2022 12:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Happy birthday, PPM! I wish you to survive those hard times very well.
I completely forgot that it is on 30. September. Just the day before, in 29. I graduated finally.

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PPM Halloween Season 2021

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Banshee
Supreme Banshee


Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam)
Joined: 15 Aug 2002
Location: Brazil

PostPosted: Sun Oct 02, 2022 2:34 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Thanks SMIFFGIG and MasterHaosis! Smile

And congrats, MasterHaosis, who now deserves the Master in the name! Wink

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MasterHaosis
General


Joined: 01 Nov 2010
Location: Serbia

PostPosted: Sun Oct 02, 2022 10:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Banshee, haha thanks! Very Happy it is finally done

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PPM Halloween Season 2021

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G-E
Defense Minister


Joined: 09 Feb 2015

PostPosted: Sun Oct 02, 2022 8:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Banshee wrote:

@G-E: Sorry, but I had to delete your post. I do not tolerate this kind of toxic attitude here

That's fine, but it wasn't attitude, it was truth. On Twitter someone pointed this out to the founder, who confirmed it was an inside joke. It has nothing to do with me.

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MadHQ
Commander


Joined: 07 Nov 2003

PostPosted: Sun Oct 02, 2022 9:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

I am still older...

One more year, and PPM and me go Platinum.

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MadHQ's Graveyard - Click here!
(Permissions) - (F.A.Q.)

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radar92
Rocket Cyborg


Joined: 14 Nov 2004

PostPosted: Fri Oct 14, 2022 1:07 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Congratulation, Thank for keeping it going.

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ph34r the cute ones!

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Hassan_2030
Cyborg Cannon


Joined: 26 Feb 2010
Location: Inside my temple in Cairo.

PostPosted: Mon Oct 17, 2022 2:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

PPM forever!!!

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If you are a member of the NSA and you are reading this, then you should know, that too much curiosity killed the cat!!!
Wenn Sie ein Mitarbeiter des BND sind und das hier lesen, sollten Sie wissen, dass zu viel Neugier der Katze Tod ist!!!

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